J.D. Vance Isn't the Bridge-Building VP That Moderates Wanted: What He's Said About Women, Voting and Project 2025

After hosting months of running mate auditions on the national stage, Donald Trump decided to bring J.D. Vance onto the 2024 Republican ticket, citing the first-term Ohio senator's Ivy League education, military service and "successful business career" as factors in his decision.

Trump's VP pick pleased his most loyal fans, who see 39-year-old Vance as a promising young crusader to carry on the MAGA torch for decades to come — but it wasn't well-received by everyone, including a swath of corporate donors and moderate voters who hoped that Trump would use his No. 2 slot to diversify the ticket and widen his base.

After less than two years in Congress, Vance is a political rookie, and his brief career in venture capitalism leaves him with little business record to run on. Since launching his first political campaign in 2021, Vance has flip-flopped from his "never Trump" days to embrace the far-right's mission, at times going a step further than the former president in terms of what he'll publicly endorse.

Here's everything to know about Vance's controversies and political views, including his thoughts on human rights, foreign policy and Project 2025.

Vance wants to end abortion, and once called rape and incest exceptions 'inconvenient'

Vance has repeatedly expressed firmly anti-choice views and he campaigned for the Senate on a platform to ban abortion. Though he once called exceptions for rape and incest "inconvenient," saying that "two wrongs don't make a right," he later acknowledged the "political reality" that adding exceptions makes abortion bans more palatable to voters.

The senator has offered mixed messaging on whether he supports a federal abortion ban, more recently saying that the issue should be primarily left to states. But he has left the door open for backing federal legislation. “You can have some minimum national standards, which is my view, while also allowing the states to make up their minds,” he said during a 2022 debate.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Vance released a statement saying, "Today is a great day. ... We now enter a new phase of the pro-life movement."

He opposed Ohio's 2023 ballot measure to enshrine abortion protections into the state constitution, which passed with 57% of the vote, and while he joined fellow Senate Republicans in saying that he supports IVF, he voted down a Democratic-led bill to safeguard access to IVF. He also sat out on a vote about whether Congress should move to protect contraception.

Vance suggested that people should stay in 'violent' marriages to preserve their kids' happiness

Speaking at a Christian high school on the Senate campaign trail, Vance suggested that leaving "unhappy" and "even violent" marriages poses a threat to children. He praised his own grandparents, whom he described as violent toward one another, for staying in their "incredibly chaotic marriage."

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,' " Vance said.

He added that he's "skeptical" about whether dysfunctional couples can be happier after divorcing, and said that the "experiment" of divorce is bad for children whether or not it works out for the parents.

Vance has since accused the media of twisting his words, saying that as a victim of domestic violence, he does not condone it.

Vance proposed that parents be given more voting power by voting on behalf of their underage children

In his mission to incentivize traditional family units, Vance once proposed that parents be given more than one vote at the ballot box.

“The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds,” he said in 2021, according to The Guardian. “Let’s do this instead. Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children."

Asked if he'd be okay allowing "non-parents" a smaller voice in democracy, he responded affirmatively, and accused "the childless left" — specifically naming Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cory Booker — of setting a bad example of family-starting.

Vance added that he believes the U.S. should follow the lead of Hungary's far-right government by rewarding newly married couples with loans to start families. If the partners stay together and have kids, they would have their loans forgiven. "Why can’t we actually promote family formation?” he said.

Vance said he 'doesn't really care what happens to Ukraine'

Vance's outspoken foreign policy positions fall mostly in line with Trump's isolationist vision for America, as he's repeatedly downplayed Russian President Vladimir Putin's threat and signaled that the United States should pull funding from Ukraine and focus on quickly ending the war, even if that results in Ukraine forfeiting territory.

"I think it's ridiculous that we're focused on this border in Ukraine," he told a right-wing news outlet during his Senate campaign. "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."

Far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who has worried his fellow NATO allies by becoming increasingly close to Putin and withholding his country's support for Ukraine — was seemingly rooting for Vance to join the White House ticket.

Orbán's political director, Balázs Orbán, repeatedly took to X in the days after Vance's nomination to praise Trump's running mate choice.

Vance said he wants to ban pornography, and blamed it for low birth rates

In an interview with Catholic media outlet Crisis Magazine, Vance told the reporter that he believes porn should be outright banned in the United States, a position that made it into the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint for the next Republican-led administration.

“I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other," Vance said.

Vance opposes LGBTQ+ rights and has pushed harmful 'groomer' rhetoric about gay people

Vance has used his platform to target the LGBTQ+ community and promote the "parental rights" movement that birthed "Don't Say Gay" legislation.

Vance expressed opposition to the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act — which enshrined federal gay marriage protections just before he was elected — and during his first year in office he introduced legislation that would make providing gender-affirming care to minors a class C felony.

Vance has equated conversations around LGBTQ+ identities with the "sexualization of children." Like many other far-right politicians and parental rights groups in recent years, he called people who support education around LGBTQ+ topics "groomers."

By definition, a "groomer" is someone who exploits the naivety of minors over time, often with the goal of coaxing them toward engaging in sexual activity. The term has more recently been used by conservatives to describe gay and transgender people, putting the queer community at greater risk of hate by falsely casting LGBTQ+ people as perverse and criminal.

"I'll stop calling people 'groomers' when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children," Vance wrote on X in 2022.

Vance is the VP candidate that Project 2025's leaders wanted

One of the Trump campaign's biggest vulnerabilities right now is Project 2025, which includes a sweeping 900-page plan to turn the federal government into a MAGA machine and marry church and state at the highest levels of government. It was created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has advised every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan.

Though Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 in recent weeks (despite previously saying that he would rely on it to "save America"), Vance has been a clear ally of the movement.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said that Vance "is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement."

Roberts later said that the Heritage Foundation was privately rooting for Vance to become Trump's running mate, according to The New York Times, and he called the vice presidential candidate "a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future."

Vance has been a big proponent of one of the major pieces of Project 2025, which calls for replacing career civil service workers in federal government with Trump loyalists.

"I think that what Trump should do, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people," Vance told George Stephanopoulos in February. "And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.' "

Of Project 2025 specifically, he's said, "There are some good ideas in there."